


A Spider in the Hand

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Set on Mars because I like Mars ok, Space Pirates, cops and robbers, implied blackrom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...is worth how many in the bush, really?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Neophyte

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TeratoCybernetics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/gifts).



It is - and I would be prepared to swear this in front of any legal body you care to mention - it is one of the great injustices of life that some planets are infinitely more appealing from orbit.

I'm certain that this planet had a great many good things going for it, as dry frozen dustballs that don't even have the decency to maintain their delectable red color once you've entered the thin atmosphere go. Apparently the natives of another planet in the system had named this one after an ancient mythological god of warfare, which I suppose is fairly cool. But still. We wouldn't have been there except on business.

I was looking forward to leaving, and honestly, I was hoping that my quarry felt the same way and would move on. This planet was even less her usual style than it was mine, and while it would in theory be a pity lose the ground I'd made up in tracking her here, I was sure it wouldn't take long to track her down again. I half expected that if I paused to catch my breath for a few days she'd circle around and come to me. If there's one thing she can't do without, it's attention. She'd do something grand and stupid sooner rather than later; subtle isn't her style. But it turns out that when someone asks why you aren't off and running after a wanted outlaw with rumored connections to the Heiress Presumptive, "because she's perfectly capable of fucking it all up without my help" is not an acceptable answer!

I mean, presumably. I wasn't actually stupid enough to openly admit I know Marauder Warpluck personally, not when I'd taken so much care with what aspects of Terezi Pyrope's life had carried over to be public knowledge about Neophyte Rubygrin. So I went off on the admittedly substantial trail she'd already managed to scatter like pixie dust in her wake, and it brought me to this colony located somewhere backside of nowhere.

Tracking her down was a rotten assignment, but no one gives rookies good assignments. No one. It doesn't matter what line of work you're in, if you're at the bottom of the totem pole then you're pulling the worst assignments and that's no different in the glamorous world of law enforcement. If you've already pulled a few strings that weren't strictly yours to pull, then you're the newbie _and_ you've upset the balance of the thing. And if the higher-ups get even a whiff of anything questionable in your more youthful days... well. It takes more than some people might think to bring down an internal purge on the department, but the High Barrister's office has its own ways of running you ragged without ever admitting that's what it's doing. 

So we were going to have to make at least a token effort to look like we were trying to find her among the scattered subterranean settlements of Mars, until we managed to scare her out to more hospitable heavenly bodies.


	2. Helmsman

Terezi's just complaining because I had the _fun_ part of this. Bah. Let her keep her smokey dives and neon lights and intimidating answers out of shady customers; I've got few enough chances for real fun these days, and atmospheric flight on a low-gravity rocky planet is _great_.


	3. Neophyte

"Aren't you supposed to be undercover? The uniform kind of defeats the purpose," Aradia pointed out as I straightened my gloves and prepared to disembark, and I lifted a hand to make a good-natured rude gesture at the nearest intercom speaker. She laughed, a sound no less unrestrained and harsh than it had been when we were kids.

"I'm not _undercover_ , asshole," I explained, for what had to be the third or fourth time. "You just think I should be, because my going around in full legislacerative reds offends your sense of adventure somehow! Anyway, if she's trying that hard to avoid us, she'll be out of here before I get close enough for her to see what I'm wearing. Both of our signs are all over the port paperwork."

"You could have kept that under wraps, too, you know," she added, the pout in her voice perfectly clear though the tinny reverb of the speaker. "Might have been smarter. Are you trying to flaunt that it's us? Vriska's not going to show herself for _you_ , Terezi. She's not _that_ stupid."

"Maybe," I said with a shrug, and let myself out into the port.

Unfortunately for my sometimes annoyingly opinionated helmsman, my best lead - which I was following up on like a good little legislacerator, because if you're going to do a thing you might as well actually do it - had led us to the largest of the planet's cities, a grimy little place that was equal parts imperial outpost and smuggler's den, and I was going to have to go in on foot and without her helpful contributions. 

I'm really not sure how the place managed to be more grimy and claustrophobic than the really big ships in the imperial navy, when it was the same decor and the same architecture and the same damn canned air, but somehow it was. Maybe it was the fact that no one cared enough to keep up more than the bare minimum of maintenance. Maybe it was because besides a whole bunch of young, stupid, disgraced, or just plain unpopular trolls, it was built on the site of one of the early intrasystem colonies of the neighboring water world and still a sizable population of natives, which couldn't have helped the tone of the place.

Ok, so that's uncharitable. They're perfectly clean, most of them, if kind of bad tempered. And they're smart enough for aliens, and more or less comparable to trolls in terms of size and body plan, so while they're not a common sight outside their native star system, occasionally you do run into humans that have been exported as personal companions and pets on other colonies. There were more of them here than I'd ever encountered in one place, but their presence wasn't entirely novel.

Vriska wasn't going to be found down the respectable corridors, though; I'm pretty sure that would have been the case even if there hadn't been a hefty price on her head. She'd spent too much of her childhood playing pirates not to follow through now - as I'd spent too much of mine playing legislacerator. And I'd gotten a tip that pirates, smugglers, and other assorted trolls who'd managed to fall on the wrong side of the law after ascension frequented a particular row of awful little drinking establishments off the main strip. 

I'll admit it - I was out of my depth. I could have called in reinforcements. I didn't. I wasn't eager to draw attention to myself until I'd had a chance to put a few successes under my belt - too many skeletons in my domestic storage microblock. Given that I'd already been assigned to track down and bring in the woman who'd been one of my best friends as a wiggler, I couldn't be sure that someone wasn't already perfectly aware of some of those skeletons. This stank of a set up, honestly, a test. And it was thanks to that same insufferable would-be pirate that I was perfectly aware that it wasn't unheard of for the authorities to give assignments that inconvenient Neophytes weren't supposed to come back from.

As far as I was concerned, this was a chance to prove myself, and if in doing so I could get a little of the heat off of me and my business, so much the better. I was going to do everything I could to bring Vriska in under my own power, and, at the moment, that might mean hanging around a seedy bar on a dingy colony planet. So fucking be it.


	4. Helmsman

There are an awful lot of security routines that are built with the assumption that the captain of a vessel will keep a firewall between their helmsman and the main computer.

I've never been sure why Terezi doesn't, actually. Oh, she's not as by the book as she wants to pretend she is, but there's a difference between calling in favors until she was able to get me diverted to her personal legislacerative cruiser rather than being dumped into a bank of anonymous oarsmen in a long haul freighter somewhere, and neglecting standard installation standards. Not that I'm complaining! Most helmsmen find their way around the most stringent of the cognitive blocking programs within a sweep or two, but it's not like we advertise that real widely, and I had a much easier time getting into the communication and control systems than most people.

Terezi's also a better friend that she wants to pretend she is, but even friendly captains don't get to know about the underground helmsnetworks.

Anyway. To get back to the point, I've realized over the past couple of sweeps that there are an awful lot of the getting-around-the-computer tips that get passed around which I simply don't need, and there's a few things that I've got unrestricted access to that no one but the best hackers seem to be able to get to at all. I mean, I'm sure it took Sollux about three days to figure out the main life support controls, wherever he is, but most helmsmen can't get anywhere near them.

It's a good thing we're actually on the same side. A good thing for her, that is.


	5. Neophyte

I'd counted mostly on Vriska's preeminent ability to make enemies, and I was starting to think I'd misstepped. No one in the first four establishments I'd been in had been able or willing to give me any kind of a line on a troll of the Marauder's description, and let's face it, she's fairly distinctive. Equius's handiwork isn't exactly something you see every day, even if you're running with the kind of people who keep losing limbs.

I finally decided I felt frustrated enough to actually have a drink in one of those places, and retreated to a corner table in the fourth bar. Aradia wasn't expecting me back any time soon, and it wasn't like I intended to overindulge. But futilely chasing what smelled like a bullshit lead was thirsty work.

Which of course was the point that the woman herself deigned to not only show up in the bar, but walk straight over to my table. My pumpbiscuit just about stopped when I caught the scent of her awful blue coat sweeping across the room - she must have had it made over a half dozen times in as many sweeps, because there's no way the same one still fits her from when we were kids.

"Terezi!" she crowed, just a smidge too loudly, as she grabbed a chair, spun it around, and sat straddling the seat with coattails and scabbard fanned out behind her. "Imagine running into you here! Not that it takes a lot of imagination. I mean, you haven't exactly been subtle about looking for me, have you?"

"It's Rubygrin and you know it, _Warpluck_ ," I snapped.

"Whatever," she drawled, the kind of tone that said that in text there'd be a slightly misplaced figure eight somewhere in there. "What brings you out tonight, sis?"

I snorted. "Like you don't know you're wanted on a list of charges as long as your arm. The intact one."

"Eh, no one cares about those, really," she said. "I'd stand out more around here if I _wasn't_ wanted for something. You know, if I was law abiding. Legal."

Vriska paused for a moment, in which I studiously gave her my least impressed expression.

"I'm referring to you," she added helpfully.

"I got that."

"Just making sure!" She leaned over the table, suddenly conspirational. "Just making sure you realize that we're going our separate ways after this, Terezi."

I shrugged. "I wasn't completely sure you were even in the system until you showed up," I pointed out; she made a very poor effort to look like this wasn't news to her. "It'll be simple enough to find you on less sympathetic ground after this, Marauder."

"Maybe," she said. "Whatever. If you think smallfry like me is worth your effort."

She had my attention with that, almost despite myself; Vriska's not good at humility. If she was putting on that kind of self-effacing show, there was something afoot that she wanted me interested in. And damn her, I was curious.

"You're big enough fish for the High Barrister's office," I pointed out.

"So wouldn't it be so much better a feather in your hat if you could, for instance, do something about a colonial resistance movement?" she asked.

"How the hell is that your intel to give?"

"Maybe I ran some weapons for the Terrans," she said, shrugging. "Maybe they're turning out to be more trouble than they're worth. Look, I want them off my back, you want _someone_ to turn in, and I don't think you _really_ want me up in front of a tribunal."

She grinned, a sharp flash of white fangs in a damaged face, and I really wished I could say she was wrong.

I rocked my glass back and forth a few times, listening to the ice rattle. It was a tempting prospect, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. As I understood it, Terra was too valuable of agricultural real estate to scorch just yet, but for short-lived apes with no psionic powers, the natives were causing a lot of trouble. To take down a few of the ringleaders? Yeah, that would be a victory for me, and maybe even enough to get the higher-ups of my back about certain outlaws with connections that were a little too close to home.

After all, with things as they stand, it's not exactly a great step from catching Vriska to catching Feferi. And if Feferi goes down, so do a lot of other people I'd rather not see bloodily culled.

I sighed. "What can you give me? Actually give me, not just imply you're going to."

"Not much here," she admitted, getting up - and damn her, she'd been right when she said I didn't dare make the arrest in a place like this. "We'll talk more soon, I'm sure."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean."

She smirked. "You're not going to just _give up_ , are you?" she drawled, turning to go. Then she hesitated, looking back over her shoulder. "I saw your port manifest, by the way. You've got an Aries marked for your helm?"

"If you're asking if we managed to get Aradia, yeah, we did," I replied. "No thanks to you."

"How exactly was I supposed to stick my headstalk out on her account?" Vriska demanded. "You know I couldn't. Anyway, it would have been _completely_ inappropriate."

"No, you're right, you always did like letting other people smack her down for you."

She was quiet for a long moment, standing over me, her face unreadable in the dark, acrid atmosphere of the bar. "Well, tell her I said hi," she finally said, a little stiffly, and went.


	6. Helmsman

"Well?" I prompted, as the main bay hissed open and Terezi stormed into the loading dock. She shook her head irritably as she hurried across the scarred concrete floor and smacked a hand against the exterior port of the cruiser in a way that communicated absolutely nothing I didn't already know about the situation except that she was feeling uncommunicative as well as testy. I hoped she bruised her hand.

She didn't say anything until the portal closed behind her. "Told you I'd find her," she snapped, then, sounding far too annoyed to be really smug about it. "Or rather she found me. Wants to give me a hand up on the Terrans and their little resistance, like that's going to make us forget about _her_."

"You gonna take her up on that?" I asked, a little hesitantly, as Terezi stomped down all eight feet of the connecting passage between the cruiser's cargo bay and the control bridge.

"I don't _know_ ," she admitted. "I've got to catch up with her first, somewhere where we aren't surrounded by suspicious aliens and hostile pirates. But she'll be wanting me to catch her, now. We can pull this off."

"We can pull off... which?" I wasn't sure I liked going into something without knowing whether we went to collaborate or apprehend; I didn't like that _Terezi_ didn't seem to know.

"Either. Both," she said, a little vaguely, which wasn't reassuring. "She sends her contempt, by the way. Says it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to actually try to help you."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"Terezi?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's get her."

"...Yeah."


End file.
